In many medical facilities, medication orders are transmitted to a pharmacy from various locations throughout the hospital and by various means of communication. The process by which these medication orders are managed involves many discrete steps. Orders must be entered, transmitted and received by the pharmacy, validated, and filled according to manufacturer's specifications or established institutional guidelines. The filling process involves the selection and, where required, preparation of drug products for administration to patients in compliance with the validated order. Once filled, the resulting drug products (i.e., doses) must be delivered to the patient that requires them. One environment, by way of example, in which such transmissions and processes occur, is a hospital.
There are points in the process that are susceptible to miscommunication or loss of information. This can be problematic in terms of logging and auditing the processing and preparation of medications, which is often mandated by insurance and regulatory requirements.
The pharmacy operationally receives these medication dose orders in the form of printed labels, typically generated by a hospital pharmacy computer system, one for each medication dose order to be dispensed. In many cases, a separate label is printed for each dose to be dispensed. Pharmacists and technicians use these labels as work documents to identify the medications to make and properly prepare and issue the desired medication. The labels are then used as address labels to ensure that the medications are routed to the correct patient for use. These labels lack detailed preparation steps, causing the technician to rely on his or her memory of the preparation procedures and guidelines, seek input from a co-operator, or find a manufacturer's package insert or a written institutional guideline.
One hazard of this method is that the label represents the only record of the work needing to be performed with the result that, if the label is lost or damaged, the work may not be performed (that is, the medication dose order may not be fulfilled) and the omission does not become known until a caregiver complains because they cannot locate the medication, or because a patient experiences an adverse event because of omitted medication.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,096,212 for “Serial Data Capture and Processing” and U.S. Patent Application No. 2003/0097368 for “Data Transmission Capture in Support of Medication Preparation” describe technology for automating the preparation of medication dose orders in response to the printing of such labels, the entire disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference, as though set forth in their respective entireties. However, these systems do not manage the distribution of medication dose orders to the various pharmacy workstations at which they are to be prepared, nor do they track the distribution of the completed dose orders to the patient for whom they are intended.
While many medications can be prepared by automated systems containing “built in” knowledge of correct preparation procedures, there are still large numbers of medication dose orders that require manual preparation, or institutions whose size precludes the incorporation of automation technology. The information and knowledge regarding how to prepare the medication is typically transferred verbally from one person to another. Thus, if a clinician receives an order for which he is unaware of the correct procedure for fulfillment, the clinician would have to request assistance, and thereby acknowledge a lack of training for that particular task. However, seeking training can be a source of embarrassment or be perceived as an undesired delay, either scenario providing a potential basis for the clinician to potentially use an improper procedure for the preparation of a particular medication, significantly increasing the possibility of a serious medication error due to flawed preparation procedures. Repeated conduct in this regard can result in “self trained” experience in a manner which is inconsistent with published procedures for handling that medication. Typically, the correct procedures are defined and written in a manual or other documentation. However, there is currently no efficient way to present the relevant excerpt of the manual to the clinician in relation to the particular medication order to be processed.
Furthermore, after a doctor or nurse enters a medication order, determining the status of the order requires manual intervention. The progress of the order can not easily be determined. The order must be located, determined if it has been filled, then possibly located somewhere throughout a facility, such as a hospital, which can be complicated further as the medication dose is being transferred to the patient or as patients are moved from one location to another (e.g., from the patient's room to physical therapy or a lab).
Workload management systems for hospitals and sterile products preparation are unsophisticated and incapable of properly managing the process, causing conflicts between the level of staffing provided and the level of work to be performed.
Centralized preparation of medication dose orders within a hospital or pharmacy creates a further set of logistical problems. A large number of medication dose received within the same general time frame can quickly outpace the production capabilities of the hospital. Further, hospital pharmacies generally have no way of separating medication dose orders that are needed immediately from those dose orders that are less urgent.
For example, IV rooms currently operate via manual distribution of labels and this type of system can lead to a number of problems, including the following problems. Currently, a pharmacy that “kits” work for transmission to the IV room obtains one or more labels from a label printer, mentally determines what products and supplies are needed to prepare the requested doses, assembles those items, places the items and the labels in a bin and passes that bin into the TV room. There is no verification of correct drugs. In addition, doses are not tracked; doses become acknowledged as “lost” when a nurse indicates that an expected dose was not received at the patient care area. Some doses are very difficult to track because they cannot be prepared as soon as the label is received. Manual tracking methods often result in those doses being overlooked. There are currently no tracking metrics can definitively state what amount of work is to be done, or where the IV room is in the completion of that work.
In addition, a pharmacist by law has to approve each drug order before it can be released and delivered to a patient. Since this is a state regulated activity, there are a number of different rules and regulations imposed by the state on pharmacists in terms of the level of supervision required by a pharmacist in monitoring and approving drugs prepared by others. For example, a pharmacist may be able to approve a drug order and release it even if the pharmacist is in a different room of the same building; however, it is clear, that the pharmacist cannot approve a drug order from a remote location outside the building, such as, the home of the pharmacist or some other location. These rules and regulations can potentially limit the efficiency of the pharmacy since an order can not be released until approved by a pharmacist and therefore, if the pharmacist is temporarily unavailable, etc., the order will be delayed.
The present invention addresses one or more of these and other problems to provide a centralized medication order management, fulfillment, and tracking system. As more and more automated dispensing devices are developed, there is additional value in a mechanism in accordance with the present invention for automatically routing medication dose orders generated by the hospital pharmacy computer system to the most appropriate automated or manual workstations in the pharmacy and then tracking them to ensure that they are completed and distributed to their intended recipients.